The Alters - Game Review

You wake up on a desolate planet in a space suit, the captain has died under mysterious circumstances, her escape pod is intact but she has no life signs, you venture further into the planet to find that some resources are lootable, and eventually, we escape the radiation by entering the mobile base, something which resembles a giant motorcycle wheel with modular rooms inside. Quickly we learn that we are Jan Dolski, a builder working for Ally Corp sent on a mining mission into deep space, which has quickly gone wrong. We are going to have to use every ounce of our wit, skills and charm to navigate this triple-sun planet. 

If you would like to see The Alters Game Trailer, you can watch the youTube video below.

This is the first 5 to 10 minutes of the new game The Alters developed and published by 11 Bit Studios. This game is a fresh take on single player survival games, which has elements of cloning, base building, resource gathering, planet exploration, problem solving, time management and inventory management.

The game explores the psychology of choice, the game progresses with indie style cut scenes. Along with communication from the mining corporation who sent us here, we are thrust into a controversial subject of branching, where the habitats quantum computer branches our DNA from a specific life path to create Alters, these Alters based on the main protaganist Jan, share similiarities but made different life choices to become different versions of Jan.

It's a plot worthy of a big budget film production, the alters, require emotional reassurance, certain base requirements, and they all have different skills and personality types. Jan 01 quickly gets thrust into a leader role and has to manage the needs of his Alters, a version of himself that has taken a different path through different life decisions.

Jan Technician is one of the first Alters we meet, his branch saw him stay in college rather than moving away like the original Jan, to look after their mother, Jan technician has an interesting personality. Jan the Scientist is your atypical intelligent and slightly arrogant scientist, whom has made some great acheivements in a timeline that is different to the timeline he is branched in.

Between Act 1 and Act 2 there is a musical scene, and it's pretty cool although a little bit cheesy, and you do start to emotionally bond with the characters, they are annoying and likeable in their own way. It's a 4K game, and the graphics are fairly decent to be perfectly honest. 

The game sees us move through various Acts, each act presenting it's own challenges and tasks.

Prologue, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 and Epilogue

A day in the game is equivalent to 26 minutes in real time, and there is a sense of urgency when out exploring, there are 2 main themes of urgency, the "sunrise" which creeps up on us day by day, and the limited amount of things we can do in a day. Each day meaning that we only have a certain amount of time to do certain things. Mining for example will quickly eat into your day, and it's usually impossible to explore the whole map in a day. Night time has it's own challenges, you have a certain amount of time before you get exhausted, and if you collapse, this will reset you to the next day, often waking up late if you had a late night. The tasks from the corporpation, the emotional needs of the alters on an alien backdrop lead to an adrenaline rush from playing this game, and with the impending doom of the sunrise, certain tasks have to completed early on, to complete the story. You can't just spend the first 5 days mining, as this will invariably mean there isn't enough time to progress the story in other areas.

Since this is a survival game, it's intended that you will die, and each "save" happens at the beginning of a new day, so it's quite structured in the way that you can reload a save. You can also make saves permanent so that you can always go back to a different point.

As a fan of science fiction, this game released in June 2025 is underrated, and under-hyped, it's a clever little choice based solo-survivor game, where the relationship with the alters does matter and there are aspects of skill required in time management when exploring and mining. It's a sci-fi themed, choice based, third person, survival building game. It takes some very interesting game mechanics, and a lot of the mechanics are unique.

The story has some aspects of cliche but evolves around it's own unique storyline, mostly deep-seated around Jan our main protaganist, and the choices he has to make for himself and his crew. It's a very clever little game receiving 8/10 on IGN. 

The Alters is a highly atmospheric sci-fi character study of one man who meets the effects of the formative choices he’s made throughout his life face to face. Managing Jan’s relationships with his alternate selves while extracting enough resources from a hostile alien environment to survive is a balancing act on top of a balancing act, and it cleverly builds up the pressure over the course of its story. Exploration of these barren but eye-catching maps presents a series of puzzles and threats without resorting to blasting aliens, and the conversations and moral dilemmas that arise from Jan’s clones are a novel way to approach a game like this. It’s clearly not a big-budget game with resources to throw at cinematics and character models, but it does a lot with a little to tell its story effectively, and its occasional interface quirks don’t get in the way of that. - Dan Stapleton - IGN (13-06-2025)

You can expect to spend around 20-28 hours on the first playthrough, the game also has multiple endings, and it's designed to have multiple playthroughs, so it's a mid range game in the scheme things.